John 7:14–24

Read the passage.

The Feast of Booths was seven days long, so Jesus begins teaching the crowds on the third or fourth day. Presumably He waits this long because the Pharisees have given up looking for Him to arrest Him by that time. When the rabbis taught, as they still do today, they appealed to the authority of their teachers and their teachers before them to show that what they taught was true and correct. Jesus did not, and it confused His listeners. He taught as if He was the authority on what He taught, in Himself. In response to their confusion, He claims that His authority comes from the One who sent Him. Those who seek to follow the Lord will recognize Jesus’s teaching as being from the Lord. Jesus even generalizes this discernment to any teacher, and explains how we will know. The test is to see who gets the glory: the teacher, or the God he claims to represent?

Then, Jesus diverts to discussing the Law and how the people do not keep it. They fail at keeping it so badly that some are willing to break the Sixth Commandment and kill Him. Now, without context, hearing a public speaker say something like that does sound like paranoia. I don’t think the Pharisees had made it public that they wanted to kill Jesus, since that would be against Moses’s Law and Rome’s law as well, so the crowd’s reaction is understandable. “You have a demon!” is equivalent to saying “You’re insane!” Mental illness was attributed to evil spirits tormenting people in those days, and I would not be surprised to learn that’s the correct diagnosis more often than not. (Certainly there can be a physical component to mental illness, and medicine to correct is a wonderful thing. It’s just not necessarily the only thing wrong.)

Jesus brings up the miracle He did the last time He was in Jerusalem where He healed the lame man by the Pool of Bethesda. He points out their inconsistency because they allow for the work of circumcising boys eight days after they are born, even if that falls on a Sabbath, but they were angry at Him healing the man’s whole body on the Sabbath. I had been thinking they wanted to kill Jesus because He was claiming equal authority to God, which is true, but that issue came up because Jesus claimed God’s authority over the Sabbath by healing the man.

Help us to know the truth so we can judge with right judgement.